A Method to Derive the Time of Onset of Infection from Serological Findings

F. Steimann; M. Hayde

doi:10.1055/s-0038-1634683

Methods of Information in Medicine, Table of Contents

Methods Inf Med 1997; 36(01): 51-58
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634683

Original Article

Schattauer GmbH

A Method to Derive the Time of Onset of Infection from Serological Findings

F. Steimann

¹Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Hildesheim, Germany

,

M. Hayde

²University Children’s Hospital, University of Vienna, Austria

› Author Affiliations

Abstract

Abstract:

Among the diagnostic problems requiring a retrospective assessment of the time an event occurred is that of screening for primary infection with Toxoplasma gondii acquired during pregnancy. We suggest a method to derive the possible times of onset of infection from a small sequence of serological samples by matching them against the knowledge about possible courses of infection. Special care is taken to properly address the relative change of consecutive samples, a nontrivial problem when reasoning about sparsely sampled time courses. To investigate the practicability of our approach we conducted a retrospective and a simulated prospective evaluation based on the samples of 394 pregnancies, randomly selected from our toxoplasmosis database; we could demonstrate an overall accuracy of 95.7%.

Keywords:

Temporal Reasoning - Serodiagnosis - Infection - Onset - Toxoplasma Gondii

Full Text

References

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